Stressed about AI? Well, AI might be about to help with that.
Decreasing stress with AI-powered wearables is one of the goals of a nationwide research collaboration housed at the University of Memphis, which recently received $1.1 million in NIH funding.
While not limited to AI wearables, the mHealth Center for Discovery, Optimization & Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions (mDOT Center) is a biotechnology research hub that focuses on developing innovations to improve public health. The mDOT Center is located at the FedEx Institute of Technology on the U of M campus.
The center was founded in 2020 after receiving $5.9 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Since then, mDOT has developed software for phones and smartwatches, dubbed MOODS, to reduce stress.
“We want to bring the transformative impact of the MOODS technology reported in research studies to all interested users,” said Santosh Kumar, Ph.D. in a news release.
Kumar is the mDOT Center's lead investigator and the director of the Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge at the U of M. He's also the U of M's Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence professor in computer science.
In a recent study, over 100 participants experienced 10% less self-reported stress after using the MOODS apps for only two minutes a day, according to the release.
This was accomplished by increasing the users' awareness of their stress and prompting a range of behavior changes.
“If people are able to reduce their stress, it has the potential to slow or prevent chronic diseases, improve mental health, and boost work performance, helping save the country over $400 billion that is lost each year due to stress,” Kumar said in the release.
CuesHub, which was founded in 2022 by Kumar and another mDOT Center researcher, has licensed the technology from the study for its own app. The CuesHub Stress Alerts app is currently available for select Samsung Galaxy and Fossil smartwatches.
In addition to the U of M, the mDOT Center's members are Harvard University; the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Ohio State University; the University of California-Los Angeles; and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
